Our second night in the city, we were wandering off to find a Belgian beer after dinner when we noticed a bit of a brouhaha across the street at the Binnenhof, the Dutch parliament.
Coming from DC, we are often struck by how easy it is to just walk up to the seats of power in this capitol-but-not-the-capitol city - or even to live right on top of them. The Binnenhof is a prime example. The Dutch parliament is a beautiful complex of old and modern buildings, fronted by a moat-like lake and built around a courtyard with the 13th-century Ridderzaal - Knight's Hall - in the middle. The Dutch think nothing of using this courtyard as a pedestrian and bicycling thoroughfare.
Tuesday night there were several TV news vans parked outside the Binnenhof and a crowd of people standing behind metal barricades in the courtyard, cameras at the ready. Clearly someone important was about to come out.
Jeff and I decided to hang out for a bit, see if we could get a good "can you believe what happened on our second day in the Netherlands?!?" picture. "Maybe it's the first day of Parliament," I speculated to Jeff, "Maybe the Queen's about to come out." As the 7 o'clock hour rolled around, we watched the TV reporters film short spots, looking at their watches with exaggeration as if to say, "any moment now."
Finally, after an hour, we gave up. The tall people with the ear pieces and black trench coats were talking nonchalantly with the paunchy bike cops, and the camera crews were working their way through a box of sandwiches. No one seemed to think anything would be happening anytime soon.
Dutch politics don't get much coverage in the U.S., but this makes for a pretty good story: Parliament dissolved last February after the governing coalition failed to withdraw Dutch troops from Afghanistan. The election in June saw huge swings in party seats: The Christian Democrats (center-right) dropped from 41 to 21 seats, while the Liberals (free market liberals, not American liberals) jumped from 22 to 31 seats - and the "Freedom Party" went from 9 to 24. It's the Freedom Party that makes this interesting.
Voter turnout for the June election was 74% - low by Dutch standards
The Freedom Party is led by a funny looking man named Geert Wilders, currently on trial in Amsterdam for inciting violence against Muslims, and the primary plank of the party's platform seems to be hating on all things Islam. For example, their stated goals include taxing head scarves (which are fairly ubiquitous in the Netherlands) and banning the Koran. (Can you imagine taxing crucifixes and banning the Book of Mormon?)
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| I admit, it's an unfairly evil photo of Geert Wilders* |
The funny thing is, the more mainstream parties couldn't form a governing coalition without the Freedom Party's support - the joys and intricacies of parliamentary multi-party democracy. It took 3 months, but the final compromise - emerging right when we got to the Hague - was for the Liberals and Christian Dems to form a minority government with the tacit support of Wilders' party.
So what we were waiting for that first Tuesday night was not the Queen or visiting celebrities, but the announcement of who would actually be running the country. In the end, the Liberals and Christian Democrats had to agree to ban burkhas and halve immigration (or at least immigration from Muslim countries) to get the Freedom Party to support them in Parliament - giving the new Liberal prime minister a one-vote majority in the lower house (and none in the upper).
The Freedom Party's agenda not being very palatable to many people (myself included), this compromise took many long days (and nights) of negotiations. Hence the media stakeout, waiting to hear who the new PM is - and hoping it wouldn't be Geert Wilders. I guess the pressure ramped up when the first day of Parliament came and went and still there was no government - thus no prime minister and no agenda for parliament.
A word on the first day of Parliament: Jeff and I toured the Binnenhof our second weekend here, an effort that failed in large part because the tours are only in Dutch. Still, we got to see the Ridderzaal, which is used on the first day of Parliament every September for the Dutch equivalent of the State of the Union address: Queen Beatrix comes in her golden carriage (literally) to sit on her throne in front of all the parliamentarians and other important people and to tell them what their agenda is for the year. Evidently, this year, she didn't have much to say.
This is a fragile compromise, to say the least. But it has brought to our attention some simmering tensions rising very close to the surface of polite Dutch society. On our tour of the Binnenhof, for example, we got to see the lower chamber - where most of the work gets done - and when our professorial-looking tour guide mentioned that there was a Koran on the front podium, along with a Bible and rules of parliamentary procedure (this much, at least, I could pick up through the Dutch), all the old white men with thinning hair in our group snickered and rolled their eyes.
The lower chamber of the Binnenhof looks a lot like the UN General Assembly, but in better shape - very 1960s mod. The ornate, Golden Age halls of the upper chamber and hall of ministers - the real tourist photo ops - are in the north wing, which usually is part of the tour. Not, alas, for us. As the nice lady at the ticket desk explained, the north wing was in use over the weekend because they were still forming the government.
I started snickering when I read about the queen but immediately recalled that YES, THERE IS ACTUALLY A QUEEN THERE. Other governments are humorous. Except for the sinister racist overtones. And religious stuff. Yikes. And Falco/Amadeus/Wilders is very, very scary...and hairy--so be wary.
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